ATi graphics cards

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> It's interesting to here you are having problems with the nvidia
> binary drivers. 

Why ? Does Nvidia have a magic stick to make a driver work flawlessly on
Ubuntu on all machines ? If htey have such a stick, would they be so
kind as lend it to Gnome and it's apps ? That would be great ! ;-)

> I have been using them in both warty anf hoary (and
> many other linux distros) with no problem what so ever. on a geforce 2
> mx, geforce fx 5600, and now my 6600gt. I have never had a lock up or
> any problems at all, 

I am happy for you :o)
I don't doubt that it works for many people, otherwise I hope Nvidia
would not have released their drivers at all ! ;-)

> even during intense 3d games like doom3 and unreal tourny 2k4.

Interestingly, when I play with X-Plane, every goes fine.
the biggest (and repeatable) problem appears when I try to log-out (the
screen gets corrupted, then hangs for 5+ seconds before actually
logging-out), then logging back-in (a few Gnome components crash, then I
get screen corruption, then 10 seconds later it freezes solid).
Then there is the random seg fault and/or hard-lock that comes out of
nowhere.

> It may be another part of your system that is causing the problems.

Hmmm, when I use the 'nv' driver, all the symptoms go away, as soon as
load the 'nvidia' driver, nightmares are back. H/W is obviously
unchanged, only the driver changes...

> Maybe faulty memory? (since the onboard card uses your system memory)

Yeah I tried to go this route, trouble shooting H/W, but nothing helped.
I ran the memory test for 8 hours, not a single error. I changed the
hard drive, and also its ribbon cable, still no joy. I removed all PCI
cards, SCSI and IDE peripherals, removed 2 of the 3 RAM modules, but no.

Then I found in bugzilla hints that other people experienced the same
kind of problems, so I stopped investigating.

The only guess I can make, is that maybe it's some sort of bug between
GDM and nvidia-glx, but it's impossible to know which one of them is
really responsible. Maybe both packages have problems.
All I can hope is that both packages get updated/worked on, and that
someday, by coincidence, this "incompatibility"/bug will cure itself due
to some other, unrelated work.

At least I can work around it by using the 'nv' driver, and using
'nvidia' only when I want to play X-Plane. Not very practical, but gets
me going...


--
Vince